Strategic Aviation
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'Incredible shrinking airline seat' gets rebuke from US court - Bloomberg
Related - SEAT ACT: Top Senators Sponsoring Bill to Outlaw Low Cost Carriers, Raise Airfares - View From The Wing.
The US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, on Friday ordered aviation regulators to consider setting minimum standards for the space airlines give passengers.
The court found in favour of Flyers Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group, which had argued that steadily shrinking legroom and seat size created a safety hazard and the Federal Aviation Administration should impose new restrictions.
The FAA said in an emailed statement that the agency "does consider seat pitch in testing and assessing the safe evacuation of commercial, passenger aircraft. We are studying the ruling carefully and any potential actions we may take to address the court's findings."
The long-term impact of the court rules remains unclear. It stopped short of ordering FAA to create new rules, so the agency could conduct a review and decide not to act.
In a statement last May, the agency said it had already conducted evacuation tests on the smaller seat configurations to ensure they are safe. The agency has no rules on seat width or the distance between rows, relying instead on the evacuation standards.
In part because full-scale evacuation tests have resulted in serious injuries, the FAA and other agencies have in some cases allowed manufacturers to substitute computer simulation and more limited tests.
In its response to the suit, the FAA cited earlier evacuation studies on seat rows placed as close as 71 centimetres apart to argue existing rules were adequate to protect safety. However, the agency declined to release those studies to Flyers Rights or to the court, arguing they contained proprietary information from manufacturers.
"The problem here is that the administration has given no reasoned explanation for withholding the tests in their entirety, and it has declined to file them under seal or in redacted form," Judge Millet said in the ruling.
Related - SEAT ACT: Top Senators Sponsoring Bill to Outlaw Low Cost Carriers, Raise Airfares - View From The Wing.